I recently got hold of

I recently got hold of a HP h5450 iPAQ with built in bluetooth and WIFI, to work alongside a Nokia 6310i to give me 'always on' internet connectivity using GPRS. It was fun and games setting it up, but I eventually got it all working and i'm pretty pleased with the result, such that often when I visit client sites now I leave the laptop behind and just take my PDA and phone.

I've had the chance to try out both bluetooth and WIFI, and come to the conclusion that they're both good, in their own ways. WIFI is good around the house, and when I manage to find public hotspots (such as at Gatwick Airport North Terminal and the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, where you pay around £10 per hour, and at the Great Southern Hotel in Dublin Airport, where WIFI access is free), and bluetooth is great for connecting the PDA and phone such that I can just put the phone in my bag and forget about it. Different technologies to solve different problems.

However, Bob Frankston has written an article in which he declares that Bluetooth has failed. The article states that despite the fact it is wireless, it still has all of the limitations of wires. The premise of his argument is that as Bluetooth doesn't use real internet protocols, it is an evolutionary 'dead end' and in addition it still suffers from all the drawbacks of physical wires (proximity limitations, requirement for specific protocols/adapters, and so on).

I think he's missing the point. Bluetooth was never meant to be WIFI. It's just a replacement for wires and it's meant to be a simple protocol. It's not intended to be a networking protocol and functionally it's one up from infrared, one down from WIFI. As a poster put it on a subsequent Slashdot discussion, "As already mentioned, Bluetooth is not intended to be a networking technology. It is one up from I-R and one down from Wi-Fi. Its one up to I-R because it allows simple devices, close together, to communicate together, simply, and not need to be in line of sight. It is one down from Wi-Fi because there is no need to use something this heavy duty to transfer simple data, doing so would simply be cost restrictive and over kill - this would be akin to using 4 ton truck for moving a box's worth of paper in your office. People who understand Bluetooth are using it for things like wireless keyboards, mice and synching PDAs and mobile phone to PCs. Printers are a special case, since in most cases you would want to use Wi-Fi, but by using Bluetooth you allow a simple PDA to print out a document - I suppose printers are pushing Bluetooth to the limits of what it was designed for."

It's also worth bearing in mind where Bob Franskton is coming from. He's an employee of Microsoft who is an advocate of an alternate home communication technology, Home PNA that's been backed by Microsoft, in contrast to their lukewarm to non-existent support of Bluetooth, a European technology that Microsoft can't control.

Bluetooth works for me as a way of elminating wires, keeping communication lightweight and working universally between devices with little setup needed. It doesn't need to be killed off by WIFI for WIFI to be a success; and you don't need an IP infrastructure to move packets between your pockets. There's room for both technologies in the market, and it's the best solution for short range wire-free communication between devices that i've seen so far.